A two-week solo exhibition for contemporary painter Kerry Brewer opens on Cork Street. Tom Jeffreys is completely enchanted.
At the opening of her new Cork Street solo exhibition – entitled where no bird can fly nor fish can swim – Kerry Brewer is wearing a brooch. She'd bought it the previous day on the Portobello Road: “It makes the whole outfit,” she says. “It makes the whole show,” I say. “Exactly,” she laughs. “Without this brooch, the whole show would be shit.”
It's a joke of course – the show is dazzling – but it illustrates a point. And the point is that every viewing experience is a unique event, subject to a myriad of unknowable influences. It can never simply be a direct dialogue between work and viewer, nor should it. The viewing experience is always a one-off web of thoughts, narratives, influences, emotions. But what precise effect all of these things (even the artist's brooch) might have: that, one can never really know.
And such unknowability, I think, lies right at the heart of Kerry's work. The exhibition charts a development in Kerry's practice from earlier more obviously figurative pieces (Cambridge Circus, Morden West, A God Awful Small Affair) to later, apparently abstract works. Already in these earlier works, the seeds of this shift in emphasis are planted. The figures in A God Awful Small Affair and Cambridge Circus, for example, are relatively clear – Munchian in shape, but with expressions swirled into anonymity or universality. Morden West, however, depicts, what, a lamp-glow beneath a bridge? And is that a figure emerging, retreating into black? Night hints at fears that it refuses yet to realise.
Kerry's work involves piling up multiple oil glazes on linen – in Garret, for example, as many as 26 layers create a complexity that demands extended viewing. One needs far longer than an opening night allows. Throughout these later works, swathes of darkness are illuminated by groups of colour – aqua, violet, green. Repeated shapes become semi-visible: a girl's back, perhaps, some kind of limb, a face, a gem, a twinkling light. Eerie lurid lights frame The Covenant, forcing the eye back into a central chasm of darkness.
These are works that not only speak of and to a deeply personal engagement but also reach out into something bigger. There's a tension then between the personal and the universal, but what I love about Kerry's work is that this tension is not really foregrounded. These are delicate, intimate pieces, whose reticence and subtlety – a little like Hammershøi – speaks louder than any brash impasto posturing.
But the groups of light that punctuate Kerry's darkness – are these lights of hope, life within the encroaching gloom? Are they ever on the verge of being engulfed by the night, or do they shine all the brighter for it? I don't know. These are questions you could ask yourself for eternity. And these are works which make one yearn for the eternity in which to do so.
Kerry Brewer – where no bird can fly nor fish can swim is at 28 Cork Street until 14th March 2010.
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Image credit: Kerry Brewer, 'Christmas', Oil glaze on linen, 160x114cm, 4 glazes
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